With You When You Go
by turbomagnus
Summary: After a nightmare of what could happen if he stays, Tony decides to take the position in Rota. S4AU, 'Team Gibbs'-bashing.


Disclaimer: "NCIS" and associated characters and situations are the property of Belisario Productions and are used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit.

Author's Note; consider this giving the last... majority of the series a cross between the 'It's a Wonderful Life' and the 'Bobby Ewing'...

* * *

-o0O0o-

"...With You When You Go"  
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'

-o0O0o-

* * *

Tony DiNozzo shook his head furiously as he woke up; as far as nightmares went, the one where the Macalusos made him as a cop and skinned him alive an inch at a time no longer seemed to qualify as the worst one from which he'd ever woken up. He didn't want to think that his team would leave him looking for a terrorist without backup. The problem was that as much as he didn't want to think it, thinking about it made it seem not too unlikely. When Ziva first showed up, they left him out of a 'team' dinner; she lied and no one even bothered to verify what she'd said, not about his 'plans' or his 'scratch'. It had become as though if Ziva said something, it was considered the gospel. This was the woman who had been Ari's helper and had tried to prove he was innocent of everything he had done and in the past two years his supposed team never seemed to consider that she could be lying about anything... why? Because she was the director's friend? She was an intelligence operative, a spy, what was she even doing on a Major Case Response Team for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Tony sometimes found himself wondering. It would be like having an armored car driver work undercover Vice or putting a bicyclist on a first-string offensive line, it just wasn't a concept that made sense. When Tony considered how she had ignored his orders and undermined his authority while Gibbs was gone and even since the team leader had come back, usually claiming that her ways were better, Tony knew nothing about what he was doing and that they did things differently in Mossad...

McGee wasn't much better, either. It was like he couldn't grasp the concept that it was the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, not the Naval Computer Information Service, and that investigators had been solving cases without computers, with just old-fashioned methods like footwork, informants and hunches, long before there were computers. Long before there was even a United States Navy, for that matter. Tony had read Robert Heinlein's 'Starship Troopers' while he was in military school - the movie was okay, he thought the casting was good even if the action sequences were gratuitous - and McGee always made him think of a paragraph from the book; 'The real Navy opinion is even more extreme: The Army is obsolete and should be abolished. The Navy doesn't say this officially - but talk to a Naval officer who is on R&R and feeling his oats; you'll get an earful.' The difference was that he never had to wait until they were off-duty to get an earful from McGee on how much better he was because of his MIT degree and computer skills compared to Tony's Physical Education degree from Ohio State and the better part of a decade as a cop. All it would take would be one suspect who had as little to do with computers as possible and McGee would find himself useless, but there would still be clues for a good detective to follow... not that anyone seemed to care.

God knew that Gibbs didn't care. Despite what the former Marine claimed, Tony was fairly certain that Gibbs didn't have as much of his memory back as he claimed to have; the way he returned was a good indicator of that. He wasn't treating people the way he had always treated them, he was treating them based on cues from them and people around them which told Tony that Gibbs didn't remember how he treated anyone and if he didn't remember how he treated anyone, he likely didn't remember why he treated them in that way either. Now he treated Ziva like a princess because she acted like one, thinking she was better than everyone else; he treated McGee like he was the Senior Agent simply because McGee acted like he was and Tony himself, Tony got treated like crap by Gibbs because everyone else seemed to treat him like crap. Not just his 'team', but Abby with her 'in training' stickers, Ducky's impatience, the Director's undercover work that he couldn't tell anyone about so they made their own assumptions regarding his phone calls and coming in tired when they had the weekend off because they didn't know that he lacked the same luxury...

The idea that they would leave him without backup because they didn't see any risk in a situation was just too easy to believe. They would claim that he was imagining things, exaggerating the situation, trying to be funny, they'd never consider that they could actually be the ones in the wrong if they could find the slightest flimsy excuse to blame their actions on him. He wouldn't be surprised if even if they left him without backup and he died, they would still claim it was his own fault somehow. It was almost as bad as the idea that he would somehow fall for one of his father's acts and not only start believing that 'The Real Anthony DiNozzo' could be a decent person, but actually welcome Senior into his life, into his home, as though years of mental and emotional abuse and abandonment had never happened. Dream or not a dream, if the situation could get so bad that he'd turn to his father for acceptance and a sense of family...

One of the times they'd had a case involving the Judge Advocate General's office, Tony had taken the chance to ask a former-Naval Aviator who was one of the JAG lawyers a question that he had always wondered about, how did a pilot know when to eject? He had laughed and told Tony that there were rules and regulations guiding when, where and how to eject, but most pilots operated under a general rule of thumb; when it became more dangerous inside the plane that it was outside, it was time to punch out.

If being part of NCIS and being assigned to the Washington Navy Yard was like a plane, then it seemed like it was getting more dangerous inside than it would be outside, Tony decided. He didn't want to end up dead on some suburban street because his supposed 'teammates' were tired of hearing his voice. It was time to punch out and the parachute's name was 'Team Leader in Rota, Spain'.

-o0O0o-

* * *

Author's Note: To clear up any confusion that may arise, the premise is that it's still season four and the last nine years of the series was a dream/nightmare/premonition that Tony had of what will happen if he stays on 'Team Gibbs' instead of taking the offered promotion.


End file.
